We're back to DogCow's point. This isn't a first order consideration. You lose far more in heat due to opening the door.

Do you want regulations banning french door refrigerators due to efficiency? If you really care about efficiency, get a chest refrigerator. The bulb's heat output isn't salient, but the air temp dump due to opening the door certainly is. A chest refrigerator avoids that.

However, mandating LEDs in regular fridges is like mandating low rolling resistance tires for H2 Hummers. LRR tires make sense on a Prius, but they are a pointless "improvement" on an H2.

And this is why feel-good measures get passed. People think they are smart enough to estimate efficiency gains by the seat of their pants and then end up promoting second or third order considerations while ignoring the first order considerations.

The next thing you know, we get a law banning incandescents in refrigerators passed alongside more subsidies for corn-based ethanol fuel.

Correct. As you can tell, I'm in favor of safety/insurance/competence regulation of taxi service without the artificial scarcity caused by these fixed numbers of medallions. I don't care if it's called a medallion, a permit, or whatever... it's wrong to artificially restrict supply.

I am *against* what seems to be the modern startup model, which is "Let's pretend copyright/safety regulations/any other inconvenient law somehow doesn't apply to us, because our business model doesn't work otherwise. Once we raise billions by being 'disruptive' then we can afford to buy laws/regulatory capture and retcon that our actions were legal all along..."

In this group, along with Uber and Lyft, we have YouTube, AirBnb, various streaming music library startups, et al.

Do I believe copyright as it presently exists is unethical? Sure. But it galls me when someone gets rich by cheating and everybody seems to think it's innovation that gave them the edge in the market.

Maybe Bernie Madoff should have called his model "disruptive innovations in investing" instead.

Its as if you are saying "Uber is unethical, therefore I want the very things that makes the existing system evil to triumph over Uber! Go evil!"

So, from your perspective, low-cost taxi medallions available to any entity that can prove they have mechanically safe vehicles, drivers who are qualified/not debarred from transporting people, and that have adequate insurance/bonding to pay for injuries to their passengers... is evil.

Oh, please. I am no friend of the rent-seeking, regulatory-capture taxi cartel, but Uber is unethical as hell. "Herp derp, we're cheaper because we're *disruptive*, definitely it's not because we don't have to comply with applicable regulations."

The present scenario with Uber is metastable. Either all regulation of commercial transportation should be repealed, or, as I personally prefer, remove the restriction on taxi medallions and reduce the cost of these medallions to be the token amount necessary to verify the safety regulations are being met.

Either way, the playing field would be leveled and the market could work.

So, what you're saying is that the recent attempts to force a "the last massive gun rights limitations were passed under Raegan" narrative are as false as I said they were?

Yep. Not that the anti-gun lobby allows facts to get in the way of a narrative they wish to force.

As for the AWB shit, that's just retarded. I think most people understand at this point just how stupid that ban was. It was basically as pointless as the 1986 ban on civilian ownership of newly manufactured machine guns.

BTW, you don't have to "educate" me on how the history of gun control worldwide has been to disarm marginalized groups in order to enable more effective persecution. Gun control was originally pushed in the South by Democrats in order to keep the African Americans under their thumb. If you think I have a problem with armed blacks (or anyone else) then you're making baseless, incorrect assumptions. It's too bad that gun control laws prevented blacks from being able to defend themselves from lynchings and so forth.

For the record, I support gun ownership with strict background checks, regular checks for gun safety and mandatory serial numbers on firing pins.

"For the record, I support freedom of speech with strict prior restraint on publication, regular censorship of inciteful or seditious content, and mandatory review by a cultural diversity panel to ensure nothing will be perceived as libelous or offensive to anyone now or in the future."

BTW, you seem intelligent enough to understand that the microstamping firing pin concept is a completely unworkable fantasy technology, on the level of CSI's "enhance" video command. If you still support microstamping after doing a trivial amount of research, you will be implicitly outed as someone whose primary interest is a ban via setting impossible criteria... much like how Congress originally tried to ban marijuana by instituting a tax on it and then refusing to allow payment of said tax (that was unconstitutional, BTW).

Funny you should say that, because that's exactly what the majority of Congress and the President did in 1994 and tried to do again after Sandy Hook. Feinstein (the CCW-permit-holding hypocrite) is on record saying she wished she had been able to implement a complete confiscation at that the 1994 juncture.

Oh, did you mean to say "Almost no one wants to actually 'take away the ones we feel like letting you keep'?"

If so, tautologies are tautologies.

Let's not pretend there isn't a strong desire to recapitulate UK gun laws here, complete with bans and (ideally) confiscation.

I'm going to stop you right here if you are referring to the Hughes Amendment poison pill to the Firearm Owners Protection Act that Charlie Rangel (D, NY) gaveled through on an obviously opposed voice vote at 3 AM.

So, what examples of Reagan's federal executive action do you have to support this ridiculous claim?

An anecdote from the Golden Gate Bridge: A man was spotted on the bridge in some rather agitated state, so the police was called, and the got him. It turned out he had decided to kill himself by jumping off the left side of the Golden Gate Bridge. (Un)fortunately he found himself on the right side.

If true, this is some sort of inverse Darwin Award: failure to be removed from the gene pool, saved by sheer stupidity. A more intelligent person would have just turned 180 degrees and jumped off with their goal condition now satisfied.

I love this idea. If you discharge 300 kJ in a quarter second, that's 1.2 megawatts.

They need to continue working on these until we have pocket-sized grenades. I'm sure a megawatt or two could be used to coax some shrapnel into substantial acceleration. Or they could easily generate high power Xrays to irradiate everyone in a certain radius.

"Welcome to the future. It's just like your time, except our suicide vests are made of supercapacitors, and while our phones are paper thin now they don't fit in your pocket because they measure 25 cm diagonally"